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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Filed under: Imported

In Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, Fritz Lang, playing himself, states that the only thing CinemaScope is good for is filming funerals and snakes. Apparently, the one-eyed prick never saw one of Akira Kurosawa's Toho-Scope pictures, especially his 1958 classic, The Hidden Fortress. Even on the small screen, a place AK probably never imagined-- or wanted-- his films to be seen, the composition of every shot is a thing of beauty, and no one knew how to fill the screen while still advancing the story better than he did.

In the user comments for the film's imdb entry, one review is captioned "The director that [sic] could do no wrong," and other than the grammatical lapse, I agree wholeheartedly with the assessment. When this picture was released (1958), he had previously done The Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood, and was about to go on to Yojimbo and its sequel Sanjuro, as well as High and Low. In other words, it was the creative high point of his career, and it shows in every minute of this amazing film.

Above all else, The Hidden Fortress is cinematic entertainment of the highest order, as fun as a movie can possibly be. Everyone knows the story, since it was the "inspiration" (read: source material/plunder zone) for the first Star Wars, the saga of a warrior returning his princess to her throne with the help of a couple of squabbling lackeys. The similarity ends there, however: far from robotic, the two clowns here (played by Kurosawa favorites Minoru Chinaki and Kamatari Fujiwara) are as funny as any characters the director ever gave us, and Mifune's portrayal of the great samurai Rokurota Makabe is at once humorous and ultra-heroic, and nothing like that wimp Han Solo.

The Criterion DVD of the film is everything a fan could ask . . . almost. As quiz champeen Wayne Palmer correctly points out (and as quiz readers know, he's never wrong), "the English subtitles use modern slang that never would have escaped the lips of 16th century characters." I agree-- whoever decided to translate dialogue into American expressions like "We're screwed" and "That sucks" definitely deserves a pink slip from Criterion. (It reminds me of a Coffin Joe movie released by Something Weird, where a character exclaims in English, "Holy Cow!" and the subtitle beneath reads "Awesome!")

I was very pleased both by the turnout of correct identifications and the warm recollections most winners had for the film itself. So congratulations to the following winners: Wayne Palmer, E. Yarber, Hank Parmer, Kevin O'Bryan, Tim McDonough, and Vincent Tuss.

Posted by Steve Monaco at September 19, 2005 11:44 PM

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